There are numerous restaurants and food service operations which offer, on a twenty-four hour basis, pancakes and waffles. Except for the breakfast hour, it is inconvenient to make up a small amount of batter for each separate order. Batters which are made up and stored in the refrigerator tend to lose, in a very short time, the ability to hold gas and form a pancake which rises properly. Representative pancake batters are shown in the AVI publication Food Products Formulary, Volume II at pages 137-140. A pancake batter prepared and stored overnight in a refrigerator from a recipe such as that on page 138 entitled "Institutional Pancake and Waffle Mix" will separate into an aqueous portion and a solids portion. The material cannot be remixed and the leavening is essentially lost so that an effective pancake cannot be made.
In order to overcome these problems, pancakes have been made in the form of intermediate moisture foods which do not require refrigeration (U.S. Pat. No. 4,154,863). These foods, however, are characterized by an extremely high sugar content.
Frozen batters have also been prepared but these batters must be used once thawed and cannot be refrozen so that use of quantities less than thawed results in waste.